Digital Sovereignty: A Practical Guide for European IT Leaders

The past year has been eventful for anyone following the relationship between European regulators and American technology companies. Visa bans on former EU officials, tariff threats tied to tech regulation, US diplomats lobbying European capitals against the Digital Services Act. The headlines have been hard to miss.

But this article isn’t about politics. It’s about something far more practical: digital sovereignty, and the concentration risk that comes with ignoring it.

Whether the US-EU tensions escalate further or quietly fade, one thing they’ve exposed is just how dependent most European organisations have become on a small number of technology providers, all headquartered in one country, all operating under a single jurisdiction. For any IT leader responsible for business continuity, that dependency alone deserves a serious conversation.

The numbers tell the story

According to a 2025 European Parliament study, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google hold around 70% of the EU cloud market, while European providers have fallen to roughly 13%. Around 80% of all EU corporate spending on software and cloud flows to US vendors. Think about what that covers: email, file storage, collaboration tools, identity management, CRM systems, backup. Often the entire digital foundation of a business runs on services from just three or four US-based companies.

This isn’t because these providers are bad. They’re not. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are excellent platforms that have earned their market share through years of investment and innovation. But there’s a difference between choosing a provider because it’s the best fit and defaulting into one because you never considered the alternatives.

Add the legal dimension and it gets more interesting. The US CLOUD Act gives American authorities the legal ability to request data held by US companies, even when that data is physically stored on European soil. For European organisations operating under GDPR, this creates a tension that no amount of contractual clauses fully resolves. It’s one of the core reasons digital sovereignty has become a boardroom topic rather than just an IT concern.

This isn’t a political issue; it’s a risk management issue

Let me be clear: I don’t think the United States is going to cut off European access to cloud services. The likelihood of that happening is extremely small. US technology companies have every commercial incentive to serve European customers, and the economic interdependence runs deep in both directions.

But that’s not the right question for a CIO to ask. The right questions are more mundane, and more important:

If one of our critical providers changed their terms, pricing, or data handling policies tomorrow, what’s our fallback? Do we actually know where our data lives and under which legal framework it’s governed? Could we move our most important workloads to an alternative provider within a reasonable timeframe, or are we so deeply integrated that migration would take months? Are we compliant because of deliberate architectural choices, or because current regulations happen to protect us?

These are standard risk management questions. They apply regardless of who sits in the White House or what the European Commission decides about content moderation. Any CIO who can’t answer them has a gap in their strategy.

Digital sovereignty starts with jurisdiction

Here’s something worth noting: American companies overwhelmingly host their infrastructure in the United States, under US jurisdiction, with US providers. They don’t think twice about it. It’s the natural, obvious choice.

European companies should think the same way. Not because American infrastructure is dangerous, but because operating within your own legal jurisdiction, where you understand the regulatory framework, where your legal team can actually enforce contracts, and where your data protection obligations are unambiguous, is simply sound practice.

For a European organisation, that means European infrastructure. For an American organisation, it means American infrastructure. The principle is the same: stay within your jurisdiction and maintain control over your most critical assets.

The irony, of course, is that some of the most foundational technology enabling the entire global cloud and AI revolution comes from Europe. Every advanced chip in every data centre worldwide depends on lithography machines built by ASML in the Netherlands. Europe is far from a technology backwater, but it has been slow to turn its engineering strengths into digital sovereignty at the infrastructure level.

Diversification, not isolation

None of this means European organisations should rip out every American service and start over. That would be impractical, expensive, and unnecessary. The point isn’t isolation; it’s diversification.

The same logic you apply to other aspects of your infrastructure applies here. You wouldn’t run your entire network through a single internet provider. You wouldn’t keep all your backups in one location. You wouldn’t rely on a single vendor for every piece of your stack without at least knowing what alternatives exist. Jurisdiction and vendor geography deserve the same treatment.

European alternatives have matured significantly. Providers like Hetzner, OVHcloud, Scaleway, and Netcup offer compute and storage that’s competitive on both performance and price. Self-hosted and European-hosted options exist for email, collaboration, file storage, and identity management. For many workloads, especially the ones that matter most for data sovereignty, the alternatives aren’t just adequate. They’re excellent.

The goal is to ensure that if circumstances change, whether through regulation, pricing shifts, corporate policy changes, or something nobody predicted, you have options. You’re not locked in. You can move.

Where to start

If you’re an IT leader looking at this for the first time, the scale of the dependency can feel overwhelming. But you don’t need to migrate everything at once. Start with visibility, then move to action on the areas where the risk-reward ratio is clearest.

Map your dependencies. List every cloud service and SaaS platform your organisation relies on. Note the provider, their jurisdiction, where your data is stored, and how critical each service is to daily operations. Most organisations have never done this exercise and are surprised by what they find.

Identify the easy wins. Email, file storage, and backup are typically the simplest workloads to move onto European infrastructure. They’re well-understood, the tooling is mature, and the migration paths are straightforward. Start here to build experience and confidence.

Evaluate your lock-in. For each critical service, ask: how portable is our data? What format is it in? What would a migration actually look like? A weekend project or a six-month programme? Understanding this tells you where you’re most vulnerable.

Build optionality into new decisions. When renewing contracts or evaluating new tools, include at least one European or self-hosted alternative in the comparison. You might still choose the American option, but you’ll choose it deliberately, not by default.

Good strategy is boring strategy

Diversifying your infrastructure dependencies isn’t dramatic. It’s not a political statement. It’s the same principle behind having a second internet connection, offsite backups, or business insurance. You hope you never need it. But if circumstances change, for any reason, you’ll be glad you have options.

The organisations that will navigate the next decade best aren’t the ones making the biggest bets on any single provider or jurisdiction. They’re the ones that quietly built optionality into their architecture, maintained control over their most critical data, and made sure they could adapt when the landscape shifted.

That’s not a radical position. It’s just good infrastructure strategy. And in 2026, it’s what digital sovereignty looks like in practice.